“Really, I should hardly have thought you could find it worth your while to come all the way to Rome to be painted by Gouache,” observed Donna Tullia.  “But of course, as I say, he has talent.”

“This woman is rich,” she said to herself.  “The wives of diplomatists do not allow themselves such caprices, as a rule.  I wonder who she is?”

“Great talent,” assented Maria Consuelo.  “And great charm, I think.”

“Ah well—­of course—­I daresay.  We Romans cannot help thinking that for an artist he is a little too much occupied in being a gentleman—­and for a gentleman he is quite too much an artist.”

The remark was not original with Donna Tullia, but had been reported to her as Spicca’s, and Spicca had really said something similar about somebody else.

“I had not got that impression,” said Maria Consuelo, quietly.

“She hates him, too,” she thought.  “She seems to hate everybody.  That either means that she knows everybody, or is not received in society.”

“But of course you know him better than I do,” she added aloud, after a little pause.

At that moment a strain of music broke out above the great, soft, muffled whispering that filled the basilica.  Some thirty chosen voices of the choir of Saint Peter’s had begun the hymn “Tu es Petrus,” as the procession began to defile from the south aisle into the nave, close by the great door, to traverse the whole distance thence to the high altar.  The Pope’s own choir, consisting solely of the singers of the Sixtine Chapel, waited silently behind the lattice under the statue of Saint Veronica.

The song rang out louder and louder, simple and grand.  Those who have heard Italian singers at their best know that thirty young Roman throats can emit a volume of sound equal to that which a hundred men of any other nation could produce.  The stillness around them increased, too, as the procession lengthened.  The great, dark crowd stood shoulder to shoulder, breathless with expectation, each man and woman feeling for a few short moments that thrill of mysterious anxiety and impatience which Orsino had felt.  No one who was there can ever forget what followed.  More than forty cardinals filed out in front from the Chapel of the Pieta.  Then the hereditary assistants of the Holy See, the heads of the Colonna and the Orsini houses, entered the nave, side by side for the first time, I believe, in history.  Immediately after them, high above all the procession and the crowd, appeared the great chair of state, the huge white feathered fans moving slowly on each side, and upon the throne, the central figure of that vast display, sat the Pope, Leo the Thirteenth.

Then, without warning and without hesitation, a shout went up such as has never been heard before in that dim cathedral, nor will, perhaps, be heard again.

“Viva il Papa-Re! Long life to the Pope-King!”

At the same instant, as though at a preconcerted signal—­utterly impossible in such a throng—­in the twinkling of an eye, the dark crowd was as white as snow.  In every hand a white handkerchief was raised, fluttering and waving above every head.